What fools we were. 

Though Generation X were the last of the analogue humans, we had grown up with computers. But the internet was vast, exponentially so, and would impact every aspect of life. It was, to my young mind, an ecumenopolis, a colossal world city, incandescent with possibility. My first visit to an internet café was mind-blowing, as jerry-built as it was in retrospect. Long-used to relatives heading off to Boston and beyond and vanishing, it was astonishing to communicate with complete strangers in real-time, with ease and at little expense, on the other side of Earth. 

It was an intoxicating force. But the rapturous delirium could not last.

The internet was to cause a rupture even deeper than the printing press, manned flight or mass electrification. And yet my feeling is that the real divide was not before and after the internet; but rather before and after its transformation from an ever-expanding cosmos of potential and its contraction into the global village where we’re now trapped. An expansionist universe collapsing into neo-feudalism. This is the story of how the market eats everything including our wildest dreams — and it does so because of a language trick that we cannot resist. 

In pre-modern times, charlatans preyed upon superstitions, reading portents in comets or flogging bones. With the emergence of modern science came alchemists promising elixirs of youth or the transmutation of lead into gold. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to all manner of swindlers boasting mechanical and medical cure-alls. Oscilloclasts would cure any malady through radiowaves. Daffy’s Elixir could ease everything from the Vapours to King’s Evil. Coca-Cola was enough to dispel morphine addiction. Some innovators believed in their products, even when the costs were severe — the quietening syrups that sent Victorian babies into permanent sleep or revitalising Radium cures that caused jaws to crumble. Medicine shows are seen as the high-water mark of this tendency: travelling fairs of confidence tricksters who would alleviate locals of their money and naivety. Then they disappeared, absorbed into the unholy pan-global entity of 21st-century advertising.   

It is difficult to accept, gazing down from the lofty heights of progress on the sinners and dupes of the past, that we reside in the Golden Age of charlatanism. We like to think we’ve developed a thick skin towards commerce — but objects are the least of our worries. It’s no longer a question of being sold dubious products. 

Today’s corporations now deal in intangibles: lifestyles, philosophies, diets, self-image and ambition have all become marketable assets. They are promising us shortcuts to status, vital in an age of precarious hustling, as well as quick fixes to our innumerable economic, political and spiritual deficits. They’re selling the grift — or rather the prospect of escape from it. They’re delivered to us not by the outdatedly gauche media of billboards and television, but directly injected into social media, attuned via algorithms to our tastes and inadequacies. 

I open Instagram stories and am instantly bombarded with snake-oil salespeople hawking life-changing tonics, none of which come in a bottle. I’m told my life is unfulfilled, and I believe it, as life inevitably is, and they’ve the solitary answer. And so, they arrive, following earlier errant clicks, the desire lines of my own self-betrayals. One pitch tells me I need to manifest my desires. Another to embrace moderation. A third that I need to protect my child from mobile phones. Another that I should confront my toxic masculinity. Magnesium will save me. Masturbation will steal my life-force. Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter “M”. Each is a rabbit hole of TED talks “Smart Thinking” replicants, Faustian apps and Kafkaesque subscriptions, which will relieve me of my time and debit card details. 

More from this author

Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts

By Darran Anderson

Every good liar knows the best lies are wrapped around a nugget of truth. If we combined and enacted all the advice of social media, then perhaps physical excellence, sound mental health, enlightenment, happiness, even, might well await. Yet professional liars know the greatest lure is the unattainable and immeasurable. It’s these seductive delusions, cascading on the infinite scroll of social media, that have collapsed the internet. How did this happen?

The answer lies in the constants of the medieval village, which our global village now mimics. Festivities are periodic. Tyrants come and go. The function of the town square is to sell, regardless. Post-Reformation, the market is all. The new faith. There are many fallacies in terms of sales (cost bias, appeal to closure, sales puff, Dunning–Kruger effect etc). These might be seen as positive, at least for the hucksters, but the real profit and damage is to be made in the shadow-side. Consider what constitutes the medieval village and our own version of it.

We still have the feudal lords — CEOs, politicians etc — along with the town criers and priests of the chattering class, in thrall to the establishment while feigning to critique it. Crucially, ambitions and dreams are not the only exploited fare. All our natural fears, neurosis, envy and malice, exacerbated by living in a time when everything feels like it’s in (mis)managed decline, can be directed not to their source or solution but to the promise of temporary catharsis. This is exacted upon whoever happens to be languishing in the stocks of the global village square at any given moment, for anything from a semantic to a sexual infraction. Whatever justice, retribution or cleansing this does or does not bring, it changes nothing in the larger scheme of things. It is designed to change nothing, other than venting very real pressures through successive social media moral panics and individualised punishments.

How could we be so sophisticated and yet so susceptible? Leon Trotsky wrote of Germany mutating into the Third Reich: “Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the 20th century the 13th.” I know this quote not directly but from its inclusion in one of the great overlooked prophetic texts of our time — Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995).

The book is a jeremiad for science and against ignorance. According to Sagan, rigorous enquiry is the best way to begin to understand existence and gain a foothold in our own destiny. Science, he argues, is too important to be left to scientists and that a population which abandons it will be doomed. Though he’s most scathing towards monetised pseudoscience and organised religion (“We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours”), he also warns that science is never absolutely certain or settled, and to suggest so is unscientific. It’s not a series of sacred precepts but rather a constantly developing and self-critical way of seeing the world. Even Isaac Newton, sacrosanct for centuries, was proved inaccurate by Albert Einstein. 

When scientists believe, dogmatically or egotistically, they become priests. But science is, or should be, a “built in error-correcting machine” requiring constant maintenance and good faith. The rust that devours and endangers the machine is the same plague that has made the internet feel, paradoxically, smaller than it was; it is the plague of fallacies.

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The Portal has revealed the best of mankind

By Sam Leith

The fallacies of the internet are legion. Sagan makes it through around a dozen, but all are rife now. Ad hominem. No True Scotsman. Arguments from authority. Sunken cost. Straw men. Whataboutery. Scapegoat. The law of the excluded middle. Motte-and-bailey. Like most evils, they’re exceptionally tempting, somewhere between a language game and a mind-hack to deceive and distract your opponent. Victory ensues but at the cost of an accruing deficit with reality. It’s the refuge of every debating scoundrel and it is an epidemic online. 

Today, the market encourages weaponised fallacies in their most pernicious and dangerous forms, aided by the architecture of social media: deliberate brevity that prevents nuance, complexity or contextualisation; biased, monetised algorithms; the deliberate stirring of controversy for the metrics; the reliance on dopamine surges and adrenaline rushes; the manufacture of hyper-partisan echo-chambers; the raising of discourse to a hysterical pitch. In a neoliberal age when substantive political change seems unachievable, the battlefields are almost entirely in the realm of linguistics and signifiers. The more ineffectual in actual life, the more heated, brutal, righteous and unforgiving online. 

The problem might be an inability to adapt to a mercantile age. Though Sagan alludes to the source of our animus, he has a blind spot regarding the influence of the market. He realises that “spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available”, while “scepticism does not sell well”. And he argues against the “dumbing down of America” through “the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media”. He laments the world of “30-second sound bites”. And yet he fails to see that the market is not only the primary beneficiary of “entrepreneurial” panaceas but also the pillories and gallows of the global village, as distraction, catharsis and deterrent. 

It was this that made the online world claustrophobic, this that betrayed the initial spirit of what the internet could have been. While we tear each apart in false dichotomies, purity spirals, cosplay, and the narcissism of small differences, a deeper tectonic division goes overlooked. The meaningful chasm is between those who use the internet (and are in turn used by it in data harvesting, social engineering, surveillance), and those who profit from and stir the “culture wars” for our engagement and their profit. The Forbes’ list of billionaires is one place to begin. 

How, then, to escape? The answer lies not in answers but the antithesis. For we’re drowning in answers, and almost all of them are merely adverts. Freedom begins instead in endless questioning, uncertainty, beginning again with the scepticism and wonder of children. We must remember that there’s an entire universe out there, even if the stars are hidden by the jaundiced skyglow of the village.